As aspiring lawyers who sat the Solicitors Qualifying Examination this year find out if they have done enough to qualify, pressure is mounting on the Solicitors Regulation Authority to reform the exam.

More than 1,500 people so far have signed a petition set up by a trainee solicitor calling for reform. Now, it has emerged that senior lawyers are also concerned about the exam.

Samuel McGinty, general counsel at Loughborough University, revealed on LinkedIn that he wrote to the SRA last September after he and his colleagues supported a graduate solicitor apprentice through SQE1.

‘Due to the experience our apprentice had, plus our own insights into the assessment through supporting her, I concluded I had a moral and professional duty to set out my concerns to the SRA,’ McGinty said. ‘I'm sharing it now because of the upswell of calls to the SRA to revisit the SQE, including the petition which is circulating. Some of the matters being raised now are matters I flagged to the SRA a year ago. Nothing appears to have changed in that time.’

A studen takes a multiple-choice online exam

More than 1,500 people so far have signed a petition calling for reform of the SQE exam

Source: iStock

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Concerns raised by McGinty, who is also a committee member of the Association of University Legal Practitioners, included the use of non-disclosure agreements on the exam's contents. As well as questioning the need for candidates to sign an NDA, McGinty said it prevented unsuccessful candidates from ‘fully revisiting the areas they struggled with and discussing with peers, colleagues or supervisors’.

McGinty said candidates could only take a bottle of water into the exam room as a reasonable adjustment for an underlying medical condition that must be evidenced. There is a break halfway through the exam ‘but that leaves candidates without immediate access to water for 153 minutes unless they sacrifice some of their limited assessment time to leave the exam room to get some as needed’.

Allocating 102 seconds per question in the multiple-choice exam was ‘unreasonable’ and questions contained in the practice assessments 'appeared to me to be designed to trip up a candidate'.

The SRA has been approached for comment. Results for candidates who sat SQE2 in April are released today.